Internet telephone giant and pioneer Skype announced that members spend two billion minutes a day using its video chat service. The number proves just how badly Skype has hurt traditional phone companies, which both charge for calls and rarely have video features. It is not clear how badly this hurts the cellular subscription industry, but the trend must hurt landline communications as people use home PCs instead of home phones to communicate.
Skype announced Wednesday users are spending more than two billion minutes a day connecting with one another via the video-chat platform — enough time to watch 16 million movies or travel to the moon and back 225,000 times.
Not only is this is a big milestone for Skype in particular, it also highlights just how much people have embraced communicating via a voice over IP (VoIP) service.
“Skype has been growing in its number of minutes at double digit rate for a steady time,” Elisa Steele, corporate VP of marketing at Skype, said. “The number of mobile users continues to grow at a very strong rate too, not just from the desktop but other devices, as well.”
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